Ballysileachn

Hi hi, and thanks for coming. And thanks to Bally Town Hall for hosting this conference, and to Weyermann for sponsoring the beer and pizza.

I’m, we’re, looking forward to meeting you all later. OK, I want to talk to you all about whisky. Does everyone here like whisky?

The quandaries around the three-year minimum ageing in scotch whiskys marr innovation, and literally block newcomers in the market from establishing a ‘grain-hold.’

We don’t have the culture; nor the estate; nor the heirloom grasses. We have the tenacity and flexibilty of being new, but that won’t see us through three harvests. Clayton Christensen wants us to succeed, innovate and disrupt, but that won’t see us through three harvests.

Ardhasker Azeotrope are excited to launch the Tri-Still Engine, a machine that temporally accelerates the wood ageing process tenfold bringing a minimum-age drink to you in three months, not three years. meaning our customers enjoy a relaxing drink, and we can analyse and exchange standardised pot still phenolic quantities.

But the world is having trouble with the jumps we’re making.

Why?

We think the Tri Still Engine disrupts homeostasis, but isn’t against it. Claude Bernard says, ‘the constancy of the internal environment is the condition for a free and independent life’. We don’t disagree, although our detractors say our work perverts this condition. But, when it’s switched on, the Tri Still engine is a closed system and is internally stable, regardless of any disparaties between the inside and the out. It’s a bit like a thermos.

And, we sync the engine via open-source API to the clock of the Long Now, at 300% speed. It’s a physical cross-rhythm. The contents of the Engine fire into the future, relative to its surroundings. But they resolve inside and out with an underpinning akin to sub-saharan traditional musics.

So Ardharsker Tri-Still 3 Months is a drink for a place that’s (something like) in between the time just beyond now, and the past. It’s for the wooden-floored bus with the mobile hotspot installed, or the farm that’s managed remotely using harvest analytics. With your help, we feel like that place could be Ballysileachn. With your help: Ardhasker Togetherness, with Azeotrope Disruption.

So… you. And all the specialised distillery workers in Ballysileachn here today.

Our idea is simple: we give you a miniature USB device that transmits GeoNav, time and air quality information back to our AzeoAPI. You go to work. When we spot that you’re in range of an Uncollaborated Still, your device will beep. Press the top once. Your information will be forwarded to an eLance farm, where contract workers will look through the window of your distillery using one of the many falcon-watcher cams available online. If your boss is looking away, the device will beep twice.

If you hear two beeps, pour some of our Tri-Still whisky into your still. Remember to carry this whiskey in our flask receptacle. We’ve ionised the aluminium material of the flask, in order to preserve the vapour pressure of the liquid within.

(We’ve seen trace markings that this works. You’re testing this at scale, though.)

Pour the whiskey into your still, and click the top of your device again. This will send an email via Azeo API to the eLance farm, where a worker will tag your still as a partially Collaborated Still. Each flask of whiskey adds 6.12% to this value — one tenth the boiling point of chloroform.

An Azeotrope, our namesake, is a mixture of two liquids that are mixed to the point that they cannot be unentangled by distillation. If you try, it simply vaporises proportionately.

By working together to add our Tri Still liquid to all batches of single-malt specialty whiskey in Scotland, you are creating a totally new collaboration — the number goes on endlessly, as our favourite things do.

And we think of this as an Azeotropic revolution: un-entanglable. If all whiskey is partly sped up, the rules on ageing become ignorable.

And we’ve always liked ignoring the rules.

But we don’t want to run ragged over the existing infrastructure here in Ballysileachn. We all know the history of this place: In 1891 the Lathrop University began an aggressive program of innovation in the chemical sciences.

This program was overseen by Leland Terman, a management psychologist and progenitor to the school of Rene Girard.

Terman’s policies of mimetic isolation called for Ballysileachn to be cut off from the world in order to prosper, guided by ecological and cultural precedents — the beautiful, endemic species of the Galapagos and the editorial perfection of pot stills in the remote isles as examples. Trade and trans-city routes were severed.

Students and faculty were chosen for their intellectual temerity and their propensity for solitariness. All recreational and communal facilities were design to orient interactions towards measurable goals.

A man-made reef, one fathom underwater, was erected within the water border of Ballysileachn in order to wreck incoming and outgoing ships.

Terman wanted to create a fruitful nowhere;
he dreamed of an eventual landless, stateless, unharnessed zone of innovation.

And such states need a drink.

— A social-recreational underpinning that defines the inside from the out.

A communal machine for building an internally stable culture with, and for, people who like each other and share measurable and meaningful goals that can be bet on and exchanged and that make us happy.